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Dr. Andrea Wheeler

Building Sustainable Communities with Young People and their Families: Environmental Change, Cultural Change?

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Outline

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• 3 YEAR UKERC/ESRC Funded Research Project (RES-152-27-0001)

• WORKSHOPS, theory, methods, findings.• EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHIES,

CITIZENSHIP, ETHICS AND RADICAL LIFESTYLE CHANGE

• FUTURE RESEARCH: Directions and potential collaborations.

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Sustainable development will not just be a subject in the classroom: it will be in its bricks and mortar and the way the school uses and even generates its own power. Our students won’t just be told about sustainable development, they will see and work within it: a living, learning place in which to explore what a sustainable lifestyle means. (Blair, 2004).

St Francis of Assisi Academy, Liverpool, Dining Hall

Transforming Education, and Encourage Sustainable Lifestyles

Tony Blair, Speech on Climate Change, 14 September 2004.

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St Francis of Assisi Academy, Liverpool, Dining Hall

•The UK Sustainable Development Commission argues that the Building Schools for the Future programme represents an opportunity to make a radical impact on children’s understanding and experience of sustainable development, the opportunity is being missued.

•The SDC is also critical of the Government’s existing strategies and assessment tools (BREEAM schools) developed by the Building Research Establishment (BRE), arguing that the bigger picture has not been grasped.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION (SDC) ON SCHOOL DESIGN

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Milliband, D (2006) "Power devolved is energy released" Local Government Association Annual Conference, Bournemouth, 4th July 2006 (last accessed September 2009)

DEFRA (2010) Mobilising individual behavioural change through community initiatives: Lessons for Climate Change http://www.cse.org.uk/pdf/pub1073.pdf

The More Recent Policy Focus on Community Initiatives

At the Local Government Association annual conference in Bournemouth, July 2006, Ed Miliband made a speech linking low carbon lifestyles and community action initiatives, entitled, "Power devolved is energy released" where he argued that devolving power to communities is essential: ‘If we are to meet environmental challenges’, he stated ‘…it will require the energy and innovation of local communities and citizens, not just the determination of international negotiators to come to agreements’ (Miliband, 2006).

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Wheeler, Andrea (2009) “The Ethical Dilemma of Lifestyle Change: Designing for sustainable schools and sustainable citizenship”. Les ateliers de l'éthique, 4(1), 140-155.

Wheeler, Andrea (2008) "Building Sustainable Schools: Are places of social interaction more important than classrooms?" In Exploring Avenues to Interdisciplinary Research: From Cross- to Multi- to Inter-disciplinarity, Maria Karanika-Murray and Rolf Wiesemes (eds.) Nottingham University Press, 2008.

Sustainable behaviour and sustainable lifestyles: an ethical dilemma or educational challenge?

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Year 6 Sustainable School Design, Team Project (1)

Design Workshops with Children –

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The Teaching Problem

How do you explore a different relationship, a non-exploitative, non-appropriative relation to the environment and to others, with young people?

How to you get young people to behave responsibly towards a broader and future other whose world we cannot know and where their/our collective action has no immediate or apparent effect?

Elvis ‘Look-a-Like-e’ Teacher, Year 8 Student Drawing

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If sustainable development is to be encouraged honestly and effectively, young people will have to enter into a discussion of community, relation, social cohesion and all the political and philosophical complexities this entails.

We need some very different ways of both teaching and designing in the 21st century, if we are to address the social and environmental problems that climate change will bring.

Theory

Scott, William A. Gert (2009) ‘Critiquing the Idea of a Sustainable School as a model and catalyst for change’ Lecture as part of the Transforming Our Schools series, The University of Nottingham. Online at:http://uilapech01.nottingham.ac.uk:8080/ess/echo/presentation/acf00f08-3e6f-4847-9e0e-3bc49aaf95f1

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“What if we no longer assume that we can know the essence and nature of the human being? – or, if we treat the question of what it means to be human as a radically open question, a question that can only be answered by engaging in education rather than as a question that needs to be answered before we can engage in education’”(Biesta, 2006: 4-5).

Biesta, Gert (2006) Beyond Learning.Also: Biesta, Gert (2009) ‘Creating Spaces for learning or Making Room for Education’ lecture as part of the Transforming Our Schools series, The University of Nottingham. Online at:http://uilapech01.nottingham.ac.uk:8080/ess/echo/presentation/98746c05-2f71-4a99-85c0-136bb4b7fd4a

Educational Philosophy

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Workshops: Theories and Methods (Co-design and Co-Research) Theories of democratic schooling and the values of free play, ownership, and children’s agency. If a school is about enabling each human being to reach their full humanity, what does this space look like?

Theatre practices such as those suggested by Augusto Boal can also inform

Questions about the ethics of critical pedagogy and its roots in/influence by phenomenology and Critical Theory (what contemporary theories about the construction of the gendered or sexuate subject bring).

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The Documentary about the school we designed…(2)

The Documentary – It leads to questions…reflection

“It’s about governments, and cars as well…” (3)

A “documentary” about the school we’ve designed/or doing being a researcher…(undirected)

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Children as Co-Designers and Co-Researchers

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Politics and the credit crunch

Adults the environment and ownership

I’m going to tell you ALL about Green politics…undirected enthusiasm …. (Year 7 Girls)

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The School We’ve Done…

What a sustainable school should be like…(for everyone)

The School We’ve Designed…(cut short)

YEAR 8: The school we designed …but lets get out of the classroom and show you want our school is really like…(undirected play)

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Our plays our scripts our performances our designs…(teacher present) (Year 7 Girls)

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Discussions1. “Global Warming Panic”: I felt frightened when I first

heard about global warming…

V1: Has anyone seen that movie? The Day after Tomorrow? V2: YesV1: Some people that that is going to happen, The Day after Tomorrow.V3: Oh is that the one where the earth gets flooded? Yes, the world all gets flooded and stuff like

that.V4: I gave all my clothes to the Tsunami when that happened.V3: What do you wear then?V2: I don’t know what’s going to happen to the world, who knows what’s going to really happen.

Whether we’re going to get finished off by flooding, whether it’s going to fly into the Sun, whether we’re all going to die due to global warming.

V3: We’ve got a few years left.V2: Whether the magma’s going to come out and flood the world with magma. Who knows whether

someone will create a zombie virus and bring zombies, dead people back to life. Who knows if aliens don’t exist and they might destroy the earth. I’m just coming up with theories about what might happen to the earth. I’m thinking be might implode.

Children described how they had been frightened by discussions of global warming and also felt suspicious of the extreme perspective they felt in some of the arguments they had heard.

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2. “Is it really our responsibility as children?”In the context of discussion about my role and purpose as a researcher, there were also discussions of whether it was indeed children’s responsibility to change their own behaviour. This can be seen in an example of dialogue from a workshop, during initial focus-group-type discussions:

Researcher: So what do you think it would take to make people behave more sustainably?V1: There’s a lot of rubbish on the field, more bins around the back for the school… […]V2: Supermarkets are saying to people [to recycle], but they put drinks in packets and wrappers […]V3: On some packing it says you can recycle it, but some people just chuck it on the floor […]V2: Because some games, computer games, there’s like plastic and you’ve got to separate it […] they should make an easier way to recycle.V3: It’s not just like the public getting it wrong because the Government aren’t really doing much about it […] and they are sending it to India!Researcher: Yeah, I saw that TV programme too.V2: Everyone is just worrying about the credit crunch, the credit crunch at the moment.V3: It might be about the public, but it is the Government as well.

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3. The Credit Crunch, Greed, Consumerism, “…

people want, want, want…”

There were also discussions of greed and the cost of being environmentally friendly. Young people understood sustainable lifestyles as more costly, and yet they could also understand the criticism that consuming less may be less expensive. A typical transcript from a workshop with Year 7 children demonstrates this:

Researcher: Do you think the credit crunch […] or the ‘economic crisis’ has something to do with global warming?

V1: Yeah [boys responding to the question].V1: Because the banks are lending money, but people aren’t paying it back…V2: Because it’s like [a man] maxed out like six credit cards and killed himself, and then his

wife had to pay it off.V1: Because like if moneys gone out of your bank account you won’t have enough money to buy

light bulbs.V2: People want, want, want, they want to go on holidays, they want big cars, they want their

children to have the latest video games.Researcher: Do you think people could stop behaving like this?V1: Some kids get spoilt a bit sometimes […] because kids get spoilt my Dad started saying

things I don’t need and I want I have to buy it myself. It teaches me how it’s going to be like when I grow up. You’re limited in what you can buy. And ones that get spoilt should do it as well […] because when they’re older it’s not going to happen and you need to work for it.

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4. “The problem of habit: “It takes a lot to break habits…”The idea that sustainable behaviour is a matter of habit was also part of

the discussion, as demonstrated in conversation with one of the girls in the workshops:

V3 [girl]: Is it about habits? It takes a lot to break habits. […] you know with the green umm… thing it’s the way you’ve been brought up, I think, and the way you act. If you act like you share all the time, you won’t be greedy, but if you don’t share and you say “no I want that now” not later, that’s just greed.

V1: And if you want it, it’s better for like the credit crunch and everything, and it’s cheaper, a week later.

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5. “Children’s agency: “..it’s like you act, you don’t have to

copy them”Significantly the young people interviewed also believed they had agency

and could behave in the way they wanted to:Researcher: Do you think it is young people that recycle and care more than their

parents?V1: Yeah they might.V2: Depends on their attitude.V1: I want to say that it doesn’t depend much on the adults, it’s like you act, you

don’t have to copy them. You can just say “no”, “not doing that”.V3: Life is too short to live someone else’s life.V4: Life is what you make it.V2: That was on an advert.

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• 3 things education does: qualification, socialisation, subjectification

• Subjectification: how you become a human being/coming into presence is the real purpose of education

• Coming into presence (Levinas) expresses an educational interest in the human subject in a more open way.

• We could start form the assumption of a radical difference between us (Levinas): one where each of us is unique and irreplaceable.

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What this Means for Transforming Education,

and Encourage Sustainable Lifestyles ?

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• We need ways of building different sorts of community (Lingis, 1994);

• We need ways of educating for those communities (Gert Biesta, 2009).

• We (as architects) need ways to interpret these approaches.

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Conclusions

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FUTURE RESEARCH THEMES AND ACTIVITIES…

Bid, “How can we build sustainable and just communities?’ AHRC Networking Grant

School Design Futures, 3 Seminars, UKERC/’Meeting Place’ Funded, 2 in Oxford and one in Cheltenham.

‘Our Common Future’ Fellowship: Germany Conference, Hamburg, November 2010.

DEFRA Sustainable Behaviours Unit Secondment/Short-Term contract

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Conference: Environmental Change, Cultural Change, Conference, Bath, 1st – 4th September 2010

What are called for are new forms of desire: new ways to make reduced consumption desirable (Soper, Kate Martin Rye and Lyn Thomas (2009) The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently. Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan.)

Humanities Perspectives on Sustainable Development

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andreaswheeler@aol.com

www.sustainability-and-schools.com

Thank You